Our reason for selecting the date of thirty-seven years ago for our
glance at the Salem of the last generation is, that at that time a
clergyman resident there fixed the attention of the inhabitants on the
history of their forefathers by delivering lectures on Witchcraft. This
gentleman was then a young man, of cultivated mind and intellectual
tastes, a popular preacher, and esteemed and beloved in private life. In
delivering those lectures he had no more idea than his audience that he
was entering upon the great work and grand intellectual interest of
his life. When he concluded the course, he was unconscious of having
offered more than the entertainment of a day; yet the engrossing
occupation of seven-and-thirty years for himself, and no little
employment and interest for others, have grown out of that early effort.
He was requested to print the lectures, and did so. They went through
more than one edition; and every time he reverted to the subject,
with some fresh knowledge gathered from new sources, he perceived
more distinctly how inadequate, and even mistaken, had been his early
conceptions of the character of the transactions which constituted
the Witch Tragedy. At length he refused to reissue the volume. "I was
unwilling," he says in the preface of the book before us, "to issue
again what I had discovered to be an insufficient presentation of the
subject." Meantime, he was penetrating into mines of materials for
history, furnished by the peculiar forms of administration instituted by
the early rulers of the province. It was an ordinance of the General
Court of Massachusetts, for instance, that testimony should in all cases
be taken in the shape of depositions, to be preserved "in perpetual
remembrance." In all trials, the evidence of witnesses was taken in
writing beforehand, the witnesses being present (except in certain
cases) to meet any examination in regard to their recorded testimony.
These depositions were carefully preserved, in complete order: and
thus we may now know as much about the landed property, the wills, the
contracts, the assaults and defamation, the thievery and cheating, and
even the personal morals and social demeanor of the citizens of Salem
of two centuries and a half ago as we could have done if they had
had law-reporters in their courts, and had filed those reports, and
preserved the police departments of newspapers like those of the present
day. The documents relating to the witchcraft proceedings have been
for the most part laid up among the State archives; but a considerable
number of them have been dispersed--no doubt from their connection with
family history, and under impulses of shame and remorse. Of these, some
are safely lodged in literary institutions, and others are in private
hands, though too many have been lost.